CIDM News and Events

Conferences

News & Events

JoAnn Hackos speaks to Managers in Boston area

JoAnn Hackos spoke to a full room of Documentation and Training Managers hosted by BMC Software, Clear Point and The Innovation Council recently. Discussion centered around the need for Documentation and Training Managers to be both technology and customer focused to bring the most value to the organization.

Vasont Systems Reports Significant Growth in Hosted Content Management System Sales

Vasont Systems, a leading provider of content management software and data services, announced that their Vasont® Hosted Content Management System (CMS) offering steadily grew by an average of 59% each year since 2006.

Mark Logic Secures $12.5 Million in Additional Funding

Mark Logic® Corporation, a leading provider of software for information-centric applications, today announced that it has closed a $12.5 million round of financing, led by Sequoia Capital and including participation from Tenaya Capital.

X-Pubs Webinar: Personalizing Content to Improve the Customer Experience

Join this free webinar and learn how you can help your organization drive better use of resources, improve quality of content, reduce costs and improve customer experience. June 2, 2009, 4pm Eastern.

Trends and Best Practices for Efficient Publishing

Join this webinar as Alan Porter of WebWorks and Bill Gamboa of Vasont Systems discuss the current trends in publishing. Alan and Bill will also address ways to improve efficiencies and reduce costs in the editorial and production processes. June 23, 2009, 1pm Eastern

Optimizing Your SharePoint Investment—Through Search & Information Architecture FREE June Webinars

Join Earley & Associates for a 4-part call series dedicated to demystifying and revitalizing your SharePoint search. From basic search scopes to custom properties, unstructured content to structured data, we'll cover a variety of methods you can use to improve your search experience and results. June 4th, 11th, 18th, & 25th, 12:30pm Eastern

LISA Forum Europe: Convergence Outsourcing Globalization Services and Software Development

The 2009 LISA Forum Europe in Tallinn will address the ways in which outsourced applications development and globalization services are now converging to better deliver value to companies looking to reach world markets.

Berkeley Globalization Conference (LISA @ Berkeley)

This two-day, academic-oriented conference (with an additional day of workshops) will focus on globalization—
the business decisions and processes required to do business internationally. This conference aims to bring together researchers examining the phenomenon of globalization.

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	Now On Sale: e-version of Introduction to DITA: A Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture Finally! An electronic user guide for the popular OASIS DITA standard. If you have been using DITA, or are just joining the DITA community, this book provides you with the information you need to accomplish your goals. Buy the e-version today and download immediately!

A Sense of Urgency
JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc.

Long time participants in the Best Practices conference each September will remember the Innovator’s Forum in 2002. The Forum focused on John Kotter’s The Heart of Change. Kotter details a 9-step process for implementing change in an organization. Not only was the book the focus of discussions at the Innovator’s Forum, but it was also the subject of the working group of managers that decided to test the process in the year after the conference.

Read the article.

More articles

• Merging DITA and Data—Hal Trent
• Why do DITA Projects (Sometimes) Fail?—Bill Hackos
• Behavior-driven development catches on—Paul Krill

June 2009 Best Practices Newsletter Table of Contents
Article	Author
Content and the Bottom Line: Defining the Business Value of Your Publications	Alan Theurer, Microsoft Corporation
Can We Overdo Our Strengths?	JoAnn Hackos, CIDM
Making Quality Explicit: The Leszek Method	Mysti Berry, Salesforce.com
Introduction to DITA Conditional Processing	Dave Gash, HyperTrain dot Com
Notes from the Other Side It’s Different Working In-House!	Lea Novak, Princeton University
From Zero to Sixty in Three Seconds (in a Go-kart): How we Launched a Documentation “Library” on the Web on not Much More than a Shoestring	Maggie Evans, Citrix Systems, Inc.
If you are not a CIDM member, you can subscribe to the Best Practices newsletter online. A subscription is $99 per year. For subscribers outside the US, the cost is $109. **Please note that the printed newsletter and the enewsletter do not contain the same content.**

Merging DITA and Data
Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc.

At Comtech, we have been working on integrating two content sources: a DITA-based set of topics and an XML-based data schema. We’ve found that we can leverage the fundamental principles of DITA to merge the two sources at publication. The end result is a seamless merger between two previously isolated islands of content.

Read the article.

Why do DITA Projects (Sometimes) Fail?
Bill Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc.

JoAnn and I have been involved in scores of DITA projects. Many have been successful, resulting in higher quality documentation and substantial savings in the costs of documentation, training, and localization. But others have failed.

Read the article.

Behavior-driven development catches on
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Originally published in InfoWorld.com

Behavior-driven development (BDD), which helps users get more involved in describing an application's intended behavior, is becoming popular with developers, who are now latching on to tools that fit into the BDD vein. It's particularly relevant to agile application development approaches.

Read the article.